Miatta Kawinzi’s artistry is attuned to the pulse of their inner life, and often holds diverse states of being together with precision, through a complex and wide-ranging poetics. In the exhibition, Soft is Strong, a strain of this poetics works through fragmentation and articulates a sense of being while Black, which is extended through the exhibition’s highlighting of softness, fragility, and multiplicity. These modes of existing are still often deemed weak by a heteropatriarchal order, and derided as feminine, self-indulgent, or not worthy of emulation. Counter-notions to this order have, however, long existed in Black feminist thought, whose literary and aesthetic references resonate in this exhibition.
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Filtering by Category: Essays
"No Place Like Home," Asia Tail in conversation with John Feodorov
The works that make up John Feodorov’s exhibition, Assimilations, capture the feeling of being caught in-between destinations—geographically, culturally, and ideologically. In the paintings and prints on view, he layers intuitive gestures in acrylic and ink over collaged family photographs, historical documents, found materials, or American tourist kitsch. Elsewhere in the gallery, he creates an altar-like space with religious books from his personal archives that simultaneously represent precious family keepsakes and the tools of colonial conversion.
Read More"to build another world" by danilo machado
Here, we are. I am kitchen table, open window, record just and not yet spun. My household is pandemic and canned goods and washing hands dry. Purple gloves on the sidewalk; ambulances wailing down Brooklyn Avenue. Extended intimacies are kept at an extended distance; we only leave to walk the dog.
The stakes are high, but they have always been. Violences have always threatened vulnerabilities. There has always been urgency in dreaming inclusive futures and pasts.
The artists in Even there, there are stars pose vulnerability as a source of potential, create from a place of abundance, and insist on multitudes. Let’s follow them.
"The Context of Now: Yara El-Sherbini’s Forms of Regulation and Control" by Rosa Boshier
Forms of Regulation and Control, El-Sherbini’s current exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, hones in on the notion of control in a time in which the world feels uncontrollable. Focusing on social conditions most acutely felt in the age of COVID-19, like increased surveillance and police presence on the streets, El-Sherbini also asks us to examine other modes of surveillance and control that go largely unnoticed.
Read More"Power/Play" by Re'al Christian
Myeongsoo Kim’s collection of Olympic-themed stamps are equal parts works of art and utilitarian objects. There is a particular timelessness to the stamps that could be described as retro-futuristic. Such an aesthetic reminds the artist of the sports movies he grew up on as a child in Seoul. While he may have been too young to understand the symbolic implications of movies like Miracle on Ice (1981) and Rocky IV (1985) in the context of Cold War–era politics, he recalls how these films and others like them fetishized the West. Kim thinks of his collection of Olympic stamps and memorabilia as an extension of this fetishization. Keeping hundreds of them in a box—some laminated, some grouped together thematically—they have become uniquely personal fetish objects.
Read More“Sickly Sweet and Dirty Dazzle: Terri Friedman’s Textiles” by Alexis Wilkinson
Terri Friedman’s textile panels buzz with urgency. She employs clamorous color palettes and assembles her works out of loose gestures, uneven textures, and yarn that spills out from both planes. Rogue cords dangle, droop, and gather. Often hiding in these compositions are words like “AW/FUL,” “WAKE UP,” and “ENOUGH,” signaling the personal and national anxiety that has engendered these frenetic forms. At the same time, Friedman’s work is buoyed by an ethos of optimism; her intention is to rewire and redirect the mind, and to weave pathways to pleasure and joy in tumultuous times. Gaps widen in her dense fibers, sometimes containing colored plexiglass or stained-glass pieces, letting in the light from the other side.
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